Red Hat Single user mode

[Kihara Muriithi]

Hi,
 Sometimes back, I read Unix system administration handbook ISBN
0-13-020601-6. (It is one fun book to read by the way). On page 24,
they claim Red hat single mode is useless, since they mount every
binary, vim, ls, lsof etc dynamically linked. (My hypothesis is, this
could be driven by the need to enforce GPL)
 Now, my question is, is this claim still true today? Does anyone
share their opinion here? I booted into single mode and noticed they
still mount all the files, read only though. What is the need of this
mode then, other than to provide some RHEC questions?
 Now, emergency mode is the complete opposite. Little is mounted and
the system can only be called unfriendly and can't think of much I can
do in that mode except:
* dd the hard disk content. (Not a big deal, since the same could be
achieved from a live CD
* fsck the file system. Can be done from a live CD?? Isn't this true?
And on top of that, if fsck didn't fix the filesystem automatically,
you are in real mess unless you are Reiser or Tweedie. How do people
learn the hacks beyond this point? I understand there is a tool called
"fsdb" (file system debugger), but it don't seem to be ext3 supported.
Any advice or suggestion on what can be done in these modes is highly
appreaciated.
  Last but not least. I am under the impression that the difference
between "telinit 1" and "telinit s" is the former go from graphical
mode, for example to single mode, while the later is like
/sbin/shutdown -r now followed by "linux -s" when the system is coming
back up? Am I in the right direction here or am I dead in the water?
 Thank you in advance for your help

William
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